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'Peak Wood' Offers Parallels For Our Time
Harperdog sends in a piece from Miller McCune looking back at the history of mankind's relationship with virgin timber. Again and again, civilizations have faced a condition of "peak wood," and how they handled it (or failed to) illuminates the current situation with regard to oil. The piece ends with a quote from the 19th-century social scientist and communist theorist Friedrich Engels, who is not generally thought of as an environmental seer: "What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind? ... Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."
It's also quite possible that petroleum products do not come from buried organic material, but are created as methane is synthesized deep beneath the earth's surface, and it combines into more complex hydrocarbons as it percolates up. The Russians have been working this theory, very successfully, for decades. "Fossil" fuels may not really be made out of fossils at all.
Only humans are arrogant enough to believe that they're "above" the other animals.
When do you see a monkey choosing cocaine over food in its natural habitat?
Summary: Marx and Engels were very largely correct, and their characterisation of history as a history of class division and class struggle has largely been bourne out. And anyone who can't look at the world (and especially the USA) today and see that this class division between bourgeoisie and proletariat continues very much as they described is a fool.
Marx and Engels were the fools, their economic theories aren't even vaguely mathematically consistent, but simply hadwave it all away in a blur of populist "down with the evil rich people". That might fly in 19th century Russia my friend but we have a large and growing middle class these days, and even the very poor have almost barriers to advancing themselves should they so desire. Everybody loves a rags to riches story.
Your brainsick communist manifesto guarantees the likes of Stalin or Mao, because sooner or later someone says NO, and the hive mind you envision would need to stamp hard on those that want to hold onto their own personal possessions. Meanwhile, it does make a good living for a few semi charismatic demagogues - are socialst parties still demanding a standard 10% of income in return for membership?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
That's wheat happens when you put sand-niggers in charge of anything.
Consumption in the West has got to fall by a significant amount, whilst consumption in the Developing World should rise.
Why should this be the case? On what do you base you claim that consumption should rise in the developing world? Why should the western world have to give anything up. I can just as easily argue the current situation is our manifest destiny; and I will.
When it comes down to it me and mine matter much more to me then theirs and them; I am for keeping things as they are.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html